I went to Jonathan after the talk and said, “I’m Jewish, so I suppose this isn’t for me.” He had a good response: “Jesus himself was Jewish! He’s the Jewish Messiah, the one the Jews were waiting for. If you follow him, you’ll be following your own Messiah.”

My background is liberal Judaism—Judaism without skullcaps, regular synagogue attendance, or even the food laws. (Yes, we ate bacon!) But despite our lack of observance, I knew that I was Jewish rather than anything else.

At the age of 13 I had my bar mitzvah service, a coming-of-age ceremony in which I recited a passage from the Torah in Hebrew. I was glad to take part in it because I wanted to align myself with my Jewish ancestors. I was very conscious of the suffering experienced by my family during the Holocaust: my great-grandmother was murdered at Auschwitz; my great-aunt survived Auschwitz; and my great-uncle survived Mauthausen. They suffered simply for being Jewish. I wanted to honor that by standing in the same line of Jewishness.

Death’s Inescapable Scythe 

The long weeks of bar mitzvah preparation didn’t give me answers to life’s biggest questions. The thing on my mind at that time was the inevitability of death. It seemed to make everything I was doing pointless. I thought it was strange people put so much effort into their lives despite knowing they would die and then be forgotten. Living life seemed like writing a book using a special kind of ink that quickly faded into nothingness. Why write the book if the ink will soon disappear? Why put so much exertion into living when death makes all that striving utterly meaningless?

I remember imagining death in his black hooded cloak, scythe in hand, looking at me and laughing as I studied for a French test. I could almost hear him saying, “I’m going to have you before too long, and what good will your French verbs be to you then?” There were some weeks when I shuffled miserably through everything because I couldn’t see the purpose of any of it once you factored in death’s inescapable scythe.

Look and Live 

When I was 15, two boys at school made an announcement in our morning assembly about an upcoming meeting of their Christian group. I went along to the meeting eager to hear a new explanation of life that might finally answer my questions.

The guest speaker, a pastor named Jonathan Fletcher, gave a talk on one sentence from the Bible: “Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life” (John 3:14–15). In other words, Jonathan explained, when Jesus was lifted up on the cross, he made it possible for people to live forever. Jonathan said that when the Israelites were in the wilderness, there was a plague of venomous snakes. Moses fixed a bronze snake to a pole, and whenever the Israelites were bitten they could simply look at that bronze snake and they would live. Jonathan said that our rebellion against God was more serious than a lethal snakebite. But Jesus was willingly nailed to the cross to solve that problem by taking the punishment for sin. All we have to do is look and live.

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